Alexa gets 2M ad-supported songs: The most commonly used smart speaker feature is listening to music, so it only makes sense that Amazon bring its Music service to Echo devices for free. And by free, I mean you won’t pay any fees but you will be … [Read more...]
Can you run an OpenHAB or Home Assistant smart home in the cloud?
Typically, people who use either the OpenHAB or Home Assistant open source smart home platforms tend to run the software on their own computer or a low-cost Raspberry Pi. Can you actually run these on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud or … [Read more...]
We need a standards-based solution for smart home device and automation backups
News this week of Comcast shutting down Stringify has surely upset the service's user base. Granted it's a small group of affected users - Stringify had 100,000+ downloads in the Google Play Store compared to more than 5 million IFTTT installs, for … [Read more...]
The Wild West era of the smart home is at an end
The buyers of smart home gear woke up on Monday to some pretty bad news. The first was an article detailing why How to Geek could no longer recommend the Wink hub and the second was an email from software-based smart home platform Stringify, that it … [Read more...]
Podcast: Your smart home questions, answered!
This week Kevin and I decided to do something a bit unusual, turning our segment where we answer listener’s questions into the entire show. You guys have been sending a lot of interesting questions to the Schlage IoT Podcast Listener Hotline, and we … [Read more...]